Documents commonly are transmitted (i.e., delivered) between two or more network sites via a computer network such as, for example, the Internet. Such documents may be any known item that is capable of being represented in electronic form and transmitted between computer systems. Among other things, application programs, output from application programs (e.g., a word processing document), generic computer files, video transmissions, data messages (e.g., electronic mail), and World Wide Web pages in the Hypertext Markup language ("HTML") all may be considered to be documents.
It often is desirable that a document transmitted by a sending network site ("sender") be "non-reputedly" received by a receiving network site ("receiver"). As is known in the art, an electronic document is considered to be non-reputedly delivered when it can be proven with a high degree of certainty that the document was received by the receiving network site. To that end, unbiased third party agents ("agents") have been utilized to witness and record delivery of a document to a receiver. Agents typically intercept a document from the sender and retransmit it to the receiver after recording pertinent information, such as the sender's address, the receiver's address, date of transmission, and the contents of the document.
Problems arise, however, when a sender and a receiver cannot agree upon a single agent. In such case, electronic delivery of a document can become cumbersome and very difficult to confirm.